Author Archives: Gordon Lynch

Beyond tribalism: why we now need a cross-party approach to Brexit

After last week’s General Election, we face arguably the most uncertain period of our post-war political history. As the clock ticks down to our exit from the EU on 29th March 2019, the question of how we conduct these negotiations effectively alongside the profound instability of our domestic politics remains unresolved.

Neither the Conservatives, nor Labour, have the strength to take the lead in this process by themselves. Labour, although performing much better than expected, has won too few seats to be able to act alone, and the Conservatives remain so divided over Europe that even a confidence and supply agreement with the DUP cannot hope to paper over the cracks.

Such is the tribalism of those parties, however, that the leadership of both still wrongly assume that they can only do this alone through some form of single-party minority government. This will not only lack credibility with voters at home and our negotiating partners in Europe, though, but threaten to deepen further the divisions in our country that the EU referendum has already opened up.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 29 Comments
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  • David Le Grice
    Weird that this appears to be the first LDV article about this, and the first time anyone in the parliamentary party has spoken up about it (as far as I'm aware...
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  • Geoff Reid
    Somebody had to say it eventual!y. Thank you Tom for inviting us to be honest on this matter....
  • Hywel
    Important point there Paul. For all the angst about 'lack of cut through' that has pretty much been the case for most of the time the LIb Dems existed except f...
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    @Gwyn, I agree with David Raw about relative urgency. However, even in the list of political reforms, I would put changes to voting way below the changes that n...